Likelihood to Recommend

Airtable

It's good for people that want to start to use a project management app. Right now we use the free version, which still fits our needs. I don't think I'd recommend the paid version, we haven't felt the need to upgrade it. I think it's a better version of Google Spreadsheets and forms, so if you are using that for project management, please switch over to Airtable.

OpenAir PSA

This product is well suited for an organization that is focused on client services, project delivery, time tracking, expense reporting, and revenue recognition. From a pure project management perspective, this product is not as feature rich as say Microsoft Project Server. For organizations that are looking for detailed complex project plan and resource management (along with resource leveling, etc.), this is probably not the best suited product

OpenAir PSA

OpenAir PSA is well suited for professional services organizations that want to track project delivery from the standpoint of project milestones, time tracking, expense reporting, billing and invoicing, and project revenue recognition.

OpenAir PSA offers comprehensive time tracking of project and admin time. Project owners, line managers, and other designated individuals may be responsible for approving user’s time. Detailed reporting of time from a project/cost and resource perspective another nice feature.

Expenses can be entered by users and recorded directly against projects in NetSuite OpenAir expense reports. A workflow can be established for the expense approval process.

OpenAir PSA provide the ability to recognize revenue based on a rules an organization would like to establish. OpenAir PSA accommodates multiple recognition scenarios.

Cons

Airtable

A little more customisation of the forms would be fantastic. The interface is simple and helps avoid making problems for yourself, but being able to take out some of the white space and select different fonts or show basic formatting would be a good addition. But such is Airtable I am likely to find out with the right knowledge you can.

Not being able to connect "Bases" together. This can be addressed by building all tables you need in to one base and remembering you can always export the data out somewhere else if you need this level of integration.

If you are a larger or growing organisation, Airtables flexibility and ease at replacing spreadsheets needs to be managed (or you could replace your uncontrolled Excel addiction with an Airtable one).

OpenAir PSA

OpenAir has a very dated interface making it unappealing from a look and feel standpoint.

Much of the placement of features seems unintuitive. OpenAir is feature rich but more thought could be put into their user experience.

OpenAir generally just feels complicated for the first month you use it. To perform certain administrative tasks you have to navigate to unintuitive places. I'd like to see the administration more centrally located in its design.

OpenAir PSA

OpenAir PSA 8.2

Based on 7 answers

We plan to continue our use of NetSuite OpenAir for the reasons cited already. Outside factors, behond our control, would be the only reason we would not renew -- such as an executive mandate to use the same platform going forward. If such were to happen, our Services processes would need to be revamped, as other PSA solutions do not support our current have-to-have criteria.

Usability

Airtable

Airtable 8.6

Based on 19 answers

It's very beautiful to use, which makes usability easy. However, there are some complicated features of the platform, which makes it hard to use. It took a while to learn all the features, some things weren't as intuitive to use. But overall, it's very good. As mentioned previously, it's a better version of Google Spreadsheets.

OpenAir PSA

OpenAir PSA 9.4

Based on 4 answers

In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.

Support

Airtable

Airtable 7.0

Based on 15 answers

I haven't contacted customer support yet, so I wouldn't be able to give a fair response. We also use the free version of the app. They do have document files, which we have looked at to answer key questions. Because it looks like there are a lot of people that use airtable, we've been able to find a lot of resources online.

OpenAir PSA

OpenAir PSA 10.0

Based on 3 answers

They were responsive and knowledgeable. We had access to a single point of contact and we could contact him via phone/email as needed. It was very convenient and it made it easy since that person was already familiar with how we were using the solution, our configuration, etc.

Online Training

Airtable

OpenAir PSA

We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them

Implementation

Airtable

OpenAir PSA

OpenAir PSA 10.0

Based on 2 answers

It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that

Alternatives Considered

Airtable

It wasn't until I became aware of Airtable that we found a solution that allows us to implement the best features of a collaborative RDBMS with our staff who don't have any training. I had previously used Zoho Creator and found that it was difficult to onboard new users because of a steeper learning curve.

OpenAir PSA

Oracle PAC professional services automation tool. SAP PSA product

Our stated corporate technology direction is moving towards SAP long-term. Open Air is a stop gap for us. It was the easiest transition from QuickArrow since NetSuite acquired QuickArrow and time was of the essence. As such, we never really deep dive evaluation of Oracle or other PSA tools. We also felt that OpenAir was a robust package.

At this point, integration to our CRM or general ledger/accounting systems were not super high priorities, so long as the package had the long-term capability and APIs that would allow us to integrate. We didn’t have any integration with Quick Arrow to our CRM or GL.

SAP also has a PSA product but again, since time was of the essence, we didn’t do a deep dive. We are at least 2.5-3 years out from looking at that piece